Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/260

 any part of the State which I have yet visited, I cannot say. Moonlight is rarely helpful to too literal inquiry. The sound is very musical with a fairy-like quality. It is as if elves played musical glasses in this orchestra in which the grasshoppers and crickets are masters of the stringed instruments.

Another frog voice is that of the Southern bullfrog, which might better be named pigfrog, if voices are to count. The Northern bullfrog is a hoarse-voiced toper who bellows most sonorously for his favorite liquor. "Ah-hr-u-m!" he roars. "Ah-hr-u-m!" with the accent on the rum. This is wicked, of course, but there is a rough virility about it which bends one's mind towards forgiveness. Here is Jack Falstaff roaring for sack; Falstaff, the embodiment of coarse wickedness, and yet the best-loved rogue in the whole catalogue. No such engaging roisterer is the Southern bullfrog. His voice is but a grunt out of the fairyland which the moon makes over the misty savanna with its shallow lakes gleaming with roughened silver. Cased in this silver sits the Southern bullfrog, with his nose just out, and grunting like a young razorback. The similarity is startling, or rather it is not a similarity, but the same thing.

None of these pigfrogs grunted till the full moon of late February had brought the requisite